BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

The Supernatural and English Fiction (1995) Glen Cavaliero Cavaliero's book is an occasionally academic and dry but very useful review of what he chooses to define variously as the supernatural, the paranormal and the preternatural in English fiction. Like the donnish figure that he is, he implicitly privileges the supernatural as the numinous in literature over the attempts (as he seems to see it) of those who want to give you a good jolt or who see magic as just undiscovered science - but it has to be said that his own use of language is hardly inspiring when he moves beyond his judgements on particular authors to a consideration of theory. This is what they might call a solid performance. There is serious value to be gained from it - if only the introduction of new names to the non-specialist in literary studies. He has made me want to read Charles Williams. He brings out of the closet a number of women authors like Phyllis Paul who have been long and probably (on hi...

Salem's Lot (1975)   The Stand (1990 Revision of 1978 Edition) Night Shift (2008 collection of stories from the 1970s) Stephen King     Song of Kali (1985) Carrion Comfort (1989) Dan Simmons    Supping with Panthers (1996) Deliver Us From Evil (1997) Tom Holland Salem's Lot was Stephen King's second novel. It has the feel of a man who wants to make his mark with a best seller. What he does is to take Bram Stoker's 'Dracula', rethink it from top to bottom and position it within contemporary (1975) American culture. In the edition I have (2006) this is made clear in a useful short Afterword where King (still in his twenties when he wrote the book) also refers back to his childhood reading of EC comics. The book is replete with references to the horror canon from Poe-like cellars to graveyard whippoorwills. He seems to have two alter agos in the book which recur throughout his career in a sort of dialectic: Ben Mears, the writer, and Mark Petrie, a young ...